But both here and at her later alma mater, West Heath, she reveals, “when I was asked to act, it was only on condition that I shouldn’t have to speak.” And that’s kind of prophetic, for though she did learn to use her mouth in public, it’s essentially as a silent image rather than as a voice that she is destined to be remembered.On a hunt through the yellowing glory of the programmes for the plays put on at Hendon County Grammar School, my eye hungered for some sighting of Mandelson P. There, “in her own words”, she reveals that at her prep school, Riddlesworth Hall, “I was one of the twits who came and paid homage to the baby Jesus.” It was “the thrill of putting on make-up” that made school theatre bearable for her. Blow me down, if Anthony didn’t wander off and start distributing Christmas cards to the rest of the cast, leaving poor Harriet to struggle on solo, with the ox and the ass noisily ripping into their envelopes. I said to him, `Why do you think Miss Robisher went to the trouble of putting a Christmas post-box outside her office?’ But when that wee laddie turned on a smile, och, you could forgive him anything.”Mrs McTavish is a keen follower of her pupil’s continuing acting abilities: “When he read that passage from Corinthians at Princess Diana’s funeral, he made it so much his own – so much, as they say these days, `in the moment’ – why, you quite forgot that St Paul had had the trouble of writing it first!”That behaviour in a nativity play may be a clue to a performer’s future is borne out by Andrew Morton’s biography of Diana. The performance, on the last day of term, was what I think you media people would describe as `a different ball game’. They had a wee duet – `No room, no room / haven’t any room / haven’t any room / haven’t any room / in the inn, sir’ – and lovely firm arm-gestures.”Everything went swimmingly at rehearsal.
He had a great pal, Harriet; we used to call them Noddy and Big Ears, on account of Harriet’s rather large lobes. Well, I cast the two of them as the innkeeper and his wife, you know, the ones who turn Mary and Joseph away. Let Mrs Morag McTavish, who penned and directed the show, take up the story: “Och, he was a wee rascal when he was a bairn. “What Ann Widdecombe’s Richard II lacked in ethereality,” reports the anonymous reviewer in the La Sainte Record, “it more than made up in the occasional searing glimpses it gave of the much firmer ruler Richard might have been, had Fate allowed him to get a proper grip on himself. Top marks to Ann for a super death scene, its pathos only enhanced by Miss Abercrombie’s sterling work on the zither.”Before he went up to Durham Choir School, one Anthony Blair was causing quite a commotion at his nursery nativity play. In my mind’s ear I can still hear the happy laughter Tessa’s characterisation provoked.”Over at La Sainte Union Convent, Bath, some four years later, a woman on the other side of the political spectrum was strutting her stuff as Shakespeare’s most poetically ineffectual monarch.
By the time we came to the first performance, Mrs Malaprop’s mistakes, or `presentation problems’ as Tessa preferred to put it, had been halved. “She took direction like a lamb and was always the first to make helpful suggestions about improving Sheridan’s dusty old dialogue. Let’s begin, instead, with the current Minister for Further “Education, Education, Education”, the very lovely Baroness Tessa Blackstone.”Tessa had us all in stitches with her gaffe-prone Mrs Malaprop – especially the night she left her beauty spot backstage in a biography of Beatrice Webb!” reminisces her drama teacher at Ware Grammar School, 86-year-old Miss “Dodie” Grange. Daunted not by my chronic allergy to dust, I have spent a happy fortnight rummaging in the school magazine stacks of yesteryear and taking my trusty tape-recorder to many a Sunset Home never before lit up by a journalist’s presence.
